TRY THIS 8 STEP HIGH IMPACT LARGE SCALE DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, & BELONGING TRAINING DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT PROJECT PLAN

Small training jobs can be challenging, but they are a piece of cake compared to preparing training for thousands of participants. Offering an off the shelf training to a few thousand participants reduces the large scale training project challenges, and can work pretty well for compliance training. The off shelf training isn’t as powerful otherwise. It is the tailor-made training that increases impact. Designing, developing and facilitating a training that is tailored to meet an organization’s specific needs present unique challenges, which requires more than instructional design expertise.

You also need to think like an organizational development specialist. Consider diversity officer Sharon’s situation. She worked with the organization’s inclusion and belonging steering committee to develop plans for mandatory diversity training. The diversity recruitment revolving door is a major problem the organization needed to address. Turnover is not only costly from a human resource management perspective – the inability to keep new diversity recruits also undermined reaching the organization’s diversity goals. The training implementation was considered the best effort to change the situation.

Sharon’s request for training services proposals from potential contractors stated that the goal was to offer training that will increase a sense of belonging among employees. They advertised a call for proposals and hired a contractor through competitive bidding. The certified diversity practitioner was hired based on her expertise in diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace. Consider the steps the contractor uses for high impact training design and development:

Step 1: Understanding Clients’ Needs. The contractor took into consideration the goals, outcomes and the identified organizational problems outlined in the bid request. She knows that clients are seldom conscious of the organization’s real problems are. They are too close to it. Instead, they offer a list of what they believe is the set of problems that need to be addressed. The contractor considers the first order of business is to discern the difference between the symptoms and the real problems.

Step 2: Onboard the Organization. The real problems can only be unearthed with good, objective data. This step requires (a) developing a Diversity Balance Scorecard to identify the training return on investment, (b)  using the scorecard results to onboard the leadership team,  (c) develop an Instructional Design Plan,  (d) recruit a Steering Committee (If necessary), and (e) recruit a team of subject matter experts (SMEs) from within the organization.

Step 3:  Assess Training Needs. A comprehensive assessment includes document, key informant interview, focus group interview, and survey data collection and analyses. An analytic framework that makes sense of the data captured across the different sources tells the story of what makes the organization ticks and where the performance gaps are. 

It is not always easy to get the stakeholders in the organization to accept the contractor’s assessment results. That is why it is important to write an assessment report that covers all of the details and utilizes sound approaches. Too often contractors rely on interview and focus groups data without a formal approach to analyzing the data collected. The result is insufficient controls over the interpretations afforded by qualitative research methodology best practices. 

Focusing on identifying the competency gaps that the assessment results uncover is the key. Training is about developing competencies and managing diversity addresses how the organization makes people feel. Be ready for pushback when sharing the results and questioning your expertise. They hired you for your expertise and expect you to demonstrate it when it matters most to them.  Give them sound recommendations backed up by the data and your expertise.

Step 4: Design Training. The assessment results are used to recommend training that targets the identified competency gaps. That is the key to effective training that has an impact on the organization’s culture. Training is too often based on conjecture or subjective judgment about what the organization needs instead of objective gap analysis. The gap is either an awareness, attitude, knowledge, skill or some combination of the four. Cultural diversity training too often focuses on raising awareness or attitude change instead of the competency gaps identified through the objective assessment. 

Step 5: Develop the Training. Adult learning techniques, active learning, bite-sized learning, and just in time learning are modern approaches to learning that transfer and stick. Most diversity trainers prefer the classroom and small intimate groups for long periods of time. That is certainly ideal and preferred, but it does not necessarily increase learning. A few participants in the Diversity Executive Leadership Academy certification programs have completed the training in both the online and classroom formats. These participants consistently share a similar experience – they learn the most from online training, but the connections with other participants and the instructor are invaluable as well.  The modern workplace is quickly making those traditional training models obsolete. The twenty-first-century training programs rely on multiple training modalities for training effectiveness and transfer to the real workplace world.

Step 6: Implement the Training. Facilitating diversity, inclusion, and belonging training requires much more than great skills. Too many things often go wrong in diversity training. That is why many diversity executives avoid training. The good news is that training in managing the participants’ emotional, managing volatile conversations, and empathizing with opposing views can be taught (See Diversity Training Certification for more details).

Step 7: Evaluate the Training. Two aspects of the training need evaluation: the impact of the training and the facilitator’s delivery skills. Assess the training to make it better. The number one mistake most trainers make is relying on their subjective evaluation of how well they performed instead of consistently using an evaluation form. Nothing takes the place of assessing training outcomes with participant evaluations. The participants’ honest, anonymous feedback is the only way trainers will be able to address blind spots, training facilitation gaps, and improve evaluation results.

Step 8: Evaluate Organizational Change. Training is expected to not only change each participant but also result in a return on investment. That means that the organization is increasingly different as a result of the training in ways that are compatible with change goals. Sharon and her team wanted to reduce the number of new diversity recruits who leave within the first six months. A measure of change would be an increase in the number of recent diversity recruits that remain on the job beyond six months compared to pre-training implementation.

Summary

Too many organization’s waste time and money on inclusion and diversity projects due to poor execution. The 8-step approach to high impact training design and development above briefly summarized above offers a set of processes that increase the training impact and transfer.

If you like this article, you will find the Diversity Executive Leadership Academy cultural diversity initiative project management course valuable. It is offered in the Certified Diversity Executive certification program. 

Resources

Hubbard, E. E. (n.d.). Diversity Training Evaluation: How does your initiative measure up? 

https://diversityofficermagazine.com/diversity-inclusion/diversity-training-evaluation-how-does-your-initiative-measure-up/

Vaughn, B.E. (2019). Diversity Training: From pain island to pleasure island. https://diversityofficermagazine.com/diversity-training-pain-island/